thank you notes 2/8

i'm thankful that a busy monday isn't always a bad thing. 

i'm thankful that though this morning when it was snowing, the temperature was right on the edge of freezing and so it didn't stick, this afternoon got slightly colder and suddenly the flurries were changing the color of the world, the ground coated in a fine dusting of white. 

i'm thankful that sometimes small changes in temperature are actually important. i'm thankful that in an hour and a half, the workday will be over and i'll get to bike home through a world covered in snow and at the end of my ride there will be a warm house to go inside.

i'm thankful for the way the sunset looked through the stained glass part at the top of our front window yesterday evening

i'm thankful for sasha frere-jones' comparison of seeing lou reed smiling and hugging metallica at the release party for lulu to seeing darth vader at the beach.

i'm thankful to watch jacques pepin coach gabrielle hamilton on how to make butter rosettes. i'm thankful for the way the edge of the tip of the knife scrapes across the top of the block of soft butter and for the delicacy with which the chef curls it around with her hand to make a flower out of fat.

i'm thankful to have remembered the song "mexican blue" by jolie holland.

i'm thankful it's lunar new year. i'm thankful for one of the visiting lecturers from taiwan, who gave me a red envelope with two dollars inside it this morning. i'm thankful for the other visiting lecturer, who called me into his office to ask me about salaries and whose mind was slightly blown when i showed him how every state employee's salary is public and searchable online.

i'm thankful for d buying me what might be the most impressive candy bar i've ever eaten.

i'm thankful that when my stomach was hurting the other night and i was out of tums and my other medication wasn't working, d saved me by finding a tiny travel-size package buried deep in our medicine cabinet. i'm thankful for the minty sweetness of the relief. i'm thankful for calcium carbonate.

i'm thankful that last night, i turned the oven up too high for the poorly ventilated old house we live in and the fat of the chicken i was roasting started to smoke. i'm thankful to have played a kind of whack-a-mole with the three overly-sensitive smoke detectors in different parts of our house.

i'm thankful that after an hour of frantically fanning away smoke and with towels and bathrobes and, lacking those, just my hands, i realized that if i just pressed the blinking red button on the smoke detectors, they would stop detecting for a while.

i'm thankful for alternate nostril breathing.